Date/Time:

Nov. 2nd, 2007 19:30 (Fri.)

Venue:

Shanghai Concert Hall

Ticket Price (RMB):

320, 260, 200, 140, 80 Yuan

Seating Plan:

Click to View

Ticket State:

Out of Date!

Booking Office:

No. 272 Fengxian Road

Booking Hotline:

62172426, 62173055

Mark Chan and musicians

Music

Composer/Music Director/Vocals/

Keyboards/Wind Instruments Mark Chan

Project Music Assistant/Scorist/

Piano/Keyboards Belinda Foo

Erhu Wong On-yuen

Erhu Sunny Wong Sun-tat

Pipa Yu Jia

Guanzi/Suona Guo Yazhi

Percussion Margie Tong

Cello To be confirmed

Production Manager Jeremiah Choy

Film

Sun Yu (1900-1990) Director

Sun Yu (real name Sun Chengyu) was born in Chongqing. He studied film-making in the US in the 1920s and was one of the few Chinese directors of his time who stressed the importance of camera movement. His films were fresh and progressive, and deeply admired by China’s intellectuals. His acclaimed works include Little Toys (1933), Big Road (1935) and The Life of Wu Xun (1950)

Ruan Lingyu (1910-1935) Actor

Ruan Lingyu was born in Shanghai, the daughter of a Guangdong family. Her real name was Ruan Fenggen, and she was also known as Ruan Yuying. She left school and became an actress at the age of 16. With her excellent acting skills and versatility, she rose to the peak of Shanghai stardom and came to be known as “China’s Garbo”. Her several controversial movies provoked endless social gossip. Unable to bear the dual pressures of the gossip-mongering press and her unhappy love life, she committed suicide on 8 March 1935, taking an overdose of sleeping pills, and leaving a statement: “Gossip is a fearful thing.” She was just 25 when she died.

The Music for Little Toys

The Chinese world is a vast, impossibly vast, sea of history, culture, art and styles. When I was approached to compose music for “Little Toys”, I realized that, because it was the first full-scale scoring of a silent Chinese movie, I would be closely watched. A heavy responsibility, yes, but also an opportunity, I chose to think!

So, I went to the heart of the matter. The wonderfully human nature of the drama, the marvelous directing, acting and filming, the humour and the tragedy, crossed the twin distances of time and history and made my task easier. But only just. Finding the right tone: balancing the need to accompany the period film and not distract from it with the unavoidable need to create a score which was at the same time modern and yet moving and accessible kept me up many a sleepless night!

Ruan Lingyu as Sister Ye was my key in. Her incredible screen presence, her warmth, vulnerability and her unexpected “modern-ness” unlocked a world of melody and harmony that spread through the whole scoring. It gave me the freedom to be both as simple and romantic as I wanted and as tragic and complex as the film required. It opened up an unusual way to make music that was both Chinese and universal.

The other key that unfettered me were the wonderful musicians who make up the ensemble. Every musician that I wanted to work with me on this project agreed with a resounding ‘yes!’ and their belief and their consummate skill and passion have been both a driving force and a welcome responsibility!

With the wisdom of hindsight, Little Toys has given all of us involved in it - the music ensemble, the program managers and directors of the Hong Kong & Singapore Arts Festivals - immense satisfaction and joy (the response at the Hong Kong Arts Festival in February was stupendous, standing ovations and 5 curtain calls, something I had never seen, let alone experienced; the audience, composed of disparate types visibly and audibly moved to laughter and tears during the show). It has also stoked our desire to share and continue this new Asian music: Unabashed, emotional, rich, intelligent, modern and yet rooted in the past. And above all: Human and alive.

Enjoy!

Mark Chan

I always find it hard to put into words my thoughts and feelings about music. Harder still my own music!

But I do realize that many in the audience would like to find out a little about my working method or methods or if there is any method to the madness at all!

Firstly, let me begin with how the project started. I got to know So Kwok Wan, Program Manager of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, in 1999 when I was music director and co-composer for Lear which opened the Hong Kong Festival that year. From that intense and emotional project, through rehearsals and performances, he developed a fondness and appreciation of my music and also to my approach to music on stage:

It has to be moving, it has to speak to both heart and mind, it has to describe its own arcs within a performance peculiar to itself (the way only music can)… and it can be as deep and obscure as anything living can be… but it must communicate. It must find a home in the audience.

I am a deeply spiritual and serious person and I believe that we leave behind traces as we live. An artist perhaps leaves very distinct traces: sometimes selfish, sometimes indulgent, sometimes memorable, sometimes selfless and devoid of spite and vanity. I would like to leave behind traces of truth and beauty, deep feeling and as much honesty as I am brave enough to tell.

Kwok Wan and myself met again by chance almost two years ago now at the end of 2001. In Paris of all places where I was meeting prospective French directors for a chamber opera I was writing and producing and he looking for prospective programs for the Hong Kong Arts Festival. We met over tea and he said he was very pleased to see me and asked what had I been doing. I let him listen to some recent music I had composed and recorded so that he wouldn’t be bored while I spoke with the director I had just been introduced to. He also watched a little film I had made. I didn’t suspect what would come next. Kwok Wan told me later that afternoon he had a couple of projects he would like to collaborate with me on for the Festival and then we started talking and talking, and I stopped over in Hong Kong on my way back to Singapore from Paris.

The idea of doing a fuller scoring for a Classic Chinese silent movie was high on his list and it attracted me immediately. The choice of the film was not so immediate. It took me and him several months of finding and watching films (I watched all in all fifteen full length movies!) before we returned to the very first one he had suggested: Little Toys - Xiao Wan Yi. Something kept making me return to it. It was different in many ways from the others, it was a very balanced movie (which I initially found difficult – perhaps too balanced), it was beautifully shot, acted and directed and had both many happy scenes of rustic simple life and also many dramatic, tragic moments, heart-wrenchingly painful. It was not a simple movie in any sense, it was very much of the period but the way it evolved and moved towards its climax struck a very modern chord with me.

I said to him in the end: “This is the one, but you know, it is the hardest one to set to music…” He smiled. It had also been his instinctive favorite.

Goh Ching Lee of the Singapore Arts Festival expressed interest in the project from the moment I told her about it and it was a natural progression for the two Arts Festivals and national bodies to come to the agreement of the project as a co-commission as Hong Kong and Singapore had both been talking about collaboration for some time.

The choice of the musicians, the make-up of the ensemble was a little easier. I opted for a smaller ensemble as much for the kind of sound I wanted to achieve as for budget purposes. The movie in most parts has a disarmingly charming rusticity and real-ness that is striking. It is also both very Chinese and very Western. I elected for a mix of Western and Chinese instruments with a slight leaning to the Chinese and chose the musicians I most wanted to work with and whom I already knew and respected deeply.

Then I proceeded to shut myself in my cave and watched the film again and again ‘til I couldn’t watch it anymore. Then came that period of waiting and waiting. Like waiting for the first rain of the monsoons… And it came, the music from somewhere else (I never know where). Melodies over chords that suddenly burst out giving life to the different characters in the film: Sister Ye, Mr Yuan, Zhu Er … giving my heart windows into Innocence and Innocence lost; giving voice to the simple joys which made up the very real every day happiness of the toy-makers and villagers; giving a deep sadness and hope to regret and renewal; giving me a door into how madness grows in every day life.

As the music came tumbling out, I started my sessions with Belinda Foo, my scorist and good friend. She kept me honest by her honesty and she kept me excited by her sheer skill at the piano and her professionalism. We also at that time started exploring and creating a harmonic universe for the world of “Little Toys” – I was afraid that my instinctive writing was too simple, she kept reminding me that simple effective things are the hardest things to achieve. There have been countless times when we were working on a scene or a progression that we intuitively moved in the same way with no words being exchanged and ended up laughing or struck dumb by it.

We then started working with the musicians living in Singapore – Wong Sun Tat, his wife Yu Jia, Leslie Tan, having them in one by one to sight-read the basic scores and then in smaller groups. Then flying to Hong Kong twice to work with the three musicians residing here: Wong On Yuen (father of Sun Tat) Guo Yazhi and Margie Tong. It was in these sessions, discovering their alarming talent and deep musicality that the score started to grow in yet another direction. There is a wonderful character to Chinese instruments that decides how a melody lives and develops. And that is balanced by the even nature of the Western instruments and their temperament. But what I was not quite prepared for was how I felt the music was not mine anymore when they started playing it. It was and is a humbling experience.

It has been a difficult balancing act. A silent movie demands to be accompanied fully unlike a movie with sound and voice. I wanted to create more than an accompaniment, I wanted to make music that would have its own life while giving life to the film - but I also wanted to be true in many ways to what I feel was the artistic intent of Sun Yu, the director of the movie. I kept asking myself: “Is the music too Chinese? Is the music Chinese enough?” Ultimately I think there will be many who will ask and answer these questions - declaring my success or lack of it. We all know you can never please everyone. What I do hope is that the music has heart and depth and gives life and pleasure and pain in equally moving amounts. Just as the film does.

Mark Chan